David Weininger

The Info Mesa: Science, Business, and New Age Alchemy on the Santa Fe Plateau by Ed Regis (author) was published in 2003, featuring Weininger and other leaders of informatics in the Santa Fe area.

In 1987, Weininger founded Daylight Chemical Information Systems, Inc. along with his brother Arthur Weininger and the business associate Yosi Taitz.

Weininger moved to Pomona College in Claremont, California, working with Corwin Hansch and Albert Leo to work on the prediction of octanol-water partition coefficient (LogP) for molecules, which resulted in the software, cLogP, in 1983. The first publication on SMILES came out in 1988, while Weininger was affiliated with Pomona College.

Weininger studied at University of Rochester, first at the Eastman School of Music, then switched to chemistry. After graduation, he worked for General Electric in Canada, where he worked on water management. He then attended University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he graduated with a PhD in environmental engineering in 1978. His PhD project involves the study of Polychlorinated biphenyls in Lake Michigan at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He developed a computational model using data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) using computer graphics algorithms, by then still a nascent field.

David Weininger (August 5, 1952 – November 2, 2016) was an American cheminformatician and entrepreneur. He was most notable for inventing the chemical line notations for structures (SMILES), substructures (SMARTS) and reactions (SMIRKS). He also founded Daylight Chemical Information Systems, Inc.